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Initial reference book library/archive idea

Stephen's post about Amiga books still found in UK libraries got me thinking about something. Books about Amiga subjects must be getting quite hard to find these days, but there are still a lot of Amiga fans out there who I can imagine would be very interested in a central location to source these reference books.

Therefore I think it would be great to create an Amiga book archive containing scanned Amiga reference books in PDF format for everyone to access and download.

This could include the official Commodore Amiga manuals that were included with the system, plus reference books about anything related to the Amiga.

Obviously as the software section is already up and running, and manuals and reference books for specific software could also be interlinked into each software entry on the site, so an Amiga book archive would also aid the increase in reference content within the software section.

Do you all think this is a good idea?

And if so does anyone own any Amiga reference books and are willing to start scanning them in? I own a few and will get scanning when I have some time.

It would be great to create the PDFs so they are fully OCR'd, allowing users to search the text of each reference book.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

I also think it would be a good idea to approach each of the book publishers and/or the authors of each book series and see if they will officially grant classicamiga permission to provide their books for download on the site. That way we wouldn't be breaking any copyright rules.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

I also think it would be a good idea to approach each of the book publishers and/or the authors of each book series and see if they will officially grant classicamiga permission to provide their books for download on the site. That way we wouldn't be breaking any copyright rules.

Do you think they will allow you to do that?
the official amiga books, that came with the original amigas, i found it hard to believe but... maybe the non-official ones.
But definitely it would be very nice

The thing is, who actually owns the copyright to the original manuals and supporting books that came bundled with the actual Amigas? Does anyone still own their copyright?

I was initially thinking more about the independent non-official authors and publishers such as Bruce Smith. I've already emailed Bruce Smith to ask about his books, and from his blog site it would seem to indicate that Bruce Smith Books Publications is no longer in existence, which might be a good thing for us. I can imagine publishers that are still publishing new books would be less likely to allow us to reproduce their publications for download.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

Ah! I've got that manual too. A big A4 sized one with clear plastic cover and plastic spine bound, like you can get Staples to do if you get their printing/copying department to print out a presentation for you. Quite a big book too.

I tried learning Hisoft Basic and it was quite a nice programming language. However I gave up as I suddenly realised it was probably pointless as the language wasn't available on any other platform so wouldn't be of much use in the future. Shame really. I might play around with it again when I get the time and see what I can make it do. Maybe even code a few simple demo routines to make a high level coded demo.

Last edited by Harrison; 24th October 2008 at 23:30.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

As for scanning i have one Amiga book and thats "Complete Amiga C" and that's quite a thick book as well. When I've finished all my other scanning projects (I'm currently scanning in as many Top Secret/S.I. RPG books I can lay my hands on and am the only person in the world scanning them) I may start on this however OCRing is a bitch. The OCR software in Acrobat Pro 9 is useless and at the moment I have ABBYY Finereader 9.0 for OCR software and it takes an age to do one page let alone the 900+ in the book I've got so if i do scan them I won't be OCRing I'm afraid.